Saturday, October 25, 2003

Revisiting Knowledge Navigator

In Apple's Knowledge Navigator revisited Jon Udell sees Google, iSight, WiFi and Powerbooks. What I found interesting was the type of interactions made available. As Jon says: "Presence, attention management, and multimodal communication are woven into the piece in ways that we can clearly imagine if not yet achieve. "Contact Jill," says Prof. Bradford at one point. Moments later the computer announces that Jill is available, and brings her onscreen. While they collaboratively create some data visualizations, other calls are held in the background and then announced when the call ends.I feel as if we ought to be further down this road than we are. A universal canvas on which we can blend data from different sources is going to require clever data preparation and serious transformation magic. The obstacles that keep data and voice/video networks apart seem more political and economic than technical."